Experience the wild as a mother badger sheltering her cubs from harm. On their journey they get stalked by a bird of prey, encounter perils of the night, river rapids crossings, big forest fires and the looming threat of death by starvation. Food is to be found, but is there enough for everyone?

Steam Greenlight

About This Game

Experience the wild as a mother badger sheltering her cubs from harm. On their journey they get stalked by a bird of prey, encounter perils of the night, river rapids crossings, big forest fires and the looming threat of death by starvation.

Food is to be found, but is there enough for everyone? You will learn that the cubs need food not just to survive, but to enable them overcome the varying challenges they will face as they make their way through the world.

Are you ready for a truly different adventure, something that might evoke feelings you've never felt in a game before? In the wild, all living creatures are put to the test. The question in the end is who will survive to live another day?

Retro Family have once again composed a beautiful soundtrack to an original and graphically innovative setting in a world of nature where shelter is your only hope and survival your only goal.

The mother badger struggles are real;As a mother I felt obliged to care for my young, we set out on a journey to somewhere but ultimately leading to nowhere.Unfortunately we lost some fur-babies along the way.

-We lost Timothy to the hawk-We lost Joseph to the darkness-We lost Steve to the angry tides of the river-We lost Kane to another hawk

I died protecting Bob, this was my LEGACY7.5/10 would like to be reincarnated as a badger

I recommend not naming your badger babies, I cried IRL everytime one got taken from my grasp. :(

Shelter is a unique experience that will make you care for the little bundles of love that are your squeaking kin.In Shelter there are no score tickers, timers, kill counts, or lives. You play as the mother of five young badgers and your job is to escort them from point A to point B without any of them going hungry or starving. Shelter accomplishes the goal of informing you of duties without the use of clumsy tutorials or a narrator describing you each task. Instead, the game lets you walk around and figure it all out in an organic process that leads to understanding the world quite quickly. Shelter doesn’t tell you to grab the food, an onion, and bring it to your baby but you understand that it needs to be done before moving on. This lesson naturally teaches you the importance of food to your young’s survival. Controls are simple; you walk around with W, A, S, D keys and gather/attack with the left mouse button. You can also call for your young with the right mouse button and sprint/crawl with the usual Shift/CTRL scheme.Before going on any further about the game I need to pay praise to the wonderful world that Might and Delight has crafted. The entirety of the game, be it in an open field or a damp cave, feels like it’s been hand stitched into a quilt that wraps the player in a warm and sometimes dangerous embrace. The landscapes are bright and colorful, with textures that can only be likened to Wind Waker and even then only slightly so. The art style of Shelter, much like that of the developer’s previous title, Pid, is one entirely unique to the game. Food is important, it’s your children’s lifeblood and it stands out in the world to make finding it fairly easy. This simple way of making the food standout from the world allows it all to feel, at the risk of sounding redundant, natural.The standout graphical effect isn’t the only way to know food is around; it turns out your children are quite capable of helping you on that front. Your young’s squeals and squeaks of delight when near a food source notifies you to ram into a tree or pull an onion from the ground. The threat of starvation is but one of many dangers that loom over your young. Birds of prey soar above, waiting to snatch small badgers for their own, the darkness of a cave calls to them, and forest fires aim to burn all in their path. Every level of Shelter starts off with a simple enough problem, your young need food. Their squeals and squeaks cry out to help and off you go, looking for sustenance. But then it all changes, something happens and soon food is an afterthought and the threat of death is one that becomes far more immediate.Your young move slowly so you must wait for them to be close before pushing forward, for fear that they may straggle behind and be snatched by the bird. This sense of immediate danger happens often in Shelter and to the game’s advantage. It’s not often that you care for a non-player character but in this case you care for five, and deeply so. This sense of life and death goes both ways in Shelter as it’s not always your young that are the prey of a hunt. Badgers are omnivorous creatures so animals are fair game as are fruits and vegetables. Stalking a fox in Shelter and landing the killing blow, knowing it will feed all of your young at once, is an incredibly satisfying moment. From high grass to high grass you crawl, hoping the fox hears nothing, and then, when close enough, you pounce on the fox and land the killing blow.I must give credit to the phenomenal soundtrack created by Retro Family. They’ve proven their worth by composing a soundtrack that pushes you forward when you know you need to stop and care for your young. Each moment of danger is amplified by the music and when my group was in danger I felt as though I had a responsibility to protect them all. Forest fires wouldn’t stop me from protecting my children and no rapid river would take my baby from me. The music elevates when necessary and amplifies the motherly feeling of each moment, a soundtrack well-crafted indeed.Shelter is a survival game in the basic sense but it’s also about exploration; that being the exploration of yourself as well as the beautiful world around you. Are you the type of person who will try to run from danger or will you stop and brave any harm to protect those you love, Shelter will tell you. The world is crafted in a beautiful manor, the soundtrack amplifies each emotion, and the gameplay, while simple, makes for a deep and moving experience.

*Looks at remaining cubs* At least.. at least I could save you! It's... It's too late for h...him... But I'll protect you until you grow. Come my children. Come and follow me. Avenge your brother's death by living until you have generations of happy, safe children. Come, come my children. We will move onwards... We have to....

I shed a single tear for my single surviving badger child and four more for the ones who died (two in the darkness, one to the water, and one to that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ eagle/hawk).

Pretty cool game where you are a momma badger trying to feed and protect your five baby badgers while travelling....umm...I dont know where....I suppose yoru travels are only limited by your imagination, lol. Proper positioning of the food you gather and use of cover (in the form of tall grass) are your keys to survival. Dont do what I did and keep moving forward after dropping food for your kids. I found out after the first two perished that this was probably a bad idea, lol. Keep them in eyesight whenever possible and try to not feed them in the open if that option is available.

Anyway, this is a somewhat slow paced game, but I thought it was pretty cool, and that soundtrack was pretty awesome in my opinion and was perfect for the moments the songs played. The gameplay is as simple as walk/run/look around and then the multipurpose Rmouse/A button which is used to dig up roots, ambush critters, drop the food you gather,and call your kiddos when they wander off.

The graphics are cool in the same way that the graphics in Proteus are cool. The story/gameplay itself is actually pretty linear although it may not seem that way at first. There are five levels I believe. the ending...well...it's sad, poignant, and a circle of life deal.

All in all, I felt this was a pretty interesting exploratory game from the viewpoint of a badger. You kind of grow attached to the momma and feel some remorse when you lose one of the kiddos. I think I will give this game an 8 out of 10. There are better games out there, but this one was good and pretty unique as well.